conflict and love

here’s the problem.  in a lot of chosen families/liberatory communities. we dont have a way of dealing with conflict.  we just have to assume that we all agree.  and we dont.  i dont.  i wont.  i am standing at a slightly different angle.  i have a different perspective.  especially when we come from different cultures and communicating styles.

but.  communities go in flames often after the honey moon period.  because any conflict doesn’t feel safe.  we haven’t agreed on ways to disagree.

so people shut the fuck up.

i was talking to a friend and she reminded me that there are communities that have been doing what we dream of doing.  supporting each other.  re creating the world.  loving each other.  for centuries.   those communities dont outlive their purpose.

maybe it is so easy for us to leave a community that there is little will to stay and struggle.

maybe the staying and struggling seem so impossible because we havent agreed upon how we will talk to each other.  how we will argue.  how we will make decisions.

i am thinking about bfp’s new commenting policy. what i love about it is that it exists.  it tells us how we are to argue with one another.  hash things out.  critique another’s words.  with respect and love.

i still believe in radical love.  probably more now than ever.  this summer i focused on loving myself, my body, my past, my future.  and i realized to love myself means that i must be vulnerable to myself.  that if i am to be whole.  i must first gather the discarded and forgotten parts of myself.  my stories.  my visions.  my people.

we need to assume that we are going to disagree.  passionately.  and we must decide what is a good way to do so.  that i what i learned.  that all the parts of myself dont agree with each other.  i live with contradictory visions and conflicting folks.

family christmas

1. i come from a traditional black southern christian family.  well really its more like a clan.  from northern south carolina.

its important to know where one comes from.  in order to know where one is going.

and after christmas 2006 i realized that where i came from was seriously messed up.  and where i was going was away.  far away.

2. i was 7 months pregnant.  visiting my family for the holidays.  habibi had stayed in minneapolis to work.

first days in cairo

1. we arrived saturday night.  as we were riding in the taxi to the hotel, aza was getting cranky and so i said to her: welcome to africa.  and she quieted down relaxed her mouth and opened her eyes wider to take in the nightscape of cars zooming passed.

2.

saw this on aljazeera yesterday

3.  cairo is busy full of people ancient egypt kitsch, buildings that are never finished being built.  dusty. car horns and construction tools.  warm weather.  i had missed the third world badly.  the elegant chaos.  the burgeoning

4.  we are staying with friends with whom we hung out in jerusalem.  they are working with east african refugees in cairo.  their apartment is cute.  reminds me of my mothers interior decorating in the 80s.  stylish, afro-centric, colorful.   perhaps i can convince my mother to visit egypt.

5.

saw this on aljazeera today…

6.  i am learning how to negotiate a stroller through crazy traffic, sidewalks that glide into no sidewalks.  i find myself directing traffic with one hand while guiding the stroller…

7. watched mtv arabia last night.  i think that mtv arabia thinks that all hip hop songs should have a minimum amount of deleted words and if there arent enough ‘bad words’ in the song to be deleted they should just start deleting random words.  words in hip hop songs that were deleted last night: feather, star, bring it…

8.  even though i wasnt allowed into israel/palestine, i am really excited about the future.  although i miss the west bank.  next time i go to palestine, fuck israel, i will go on a boat to gaza.  `

9. its the lunar new year!  the annular solar eclipse!  new moon in aquarius! last year was a roller coaster.  crazy rat.

tracing out invisible maps

last night we hung out with my brother and his girlfriend and watched a stoner movie: pineapple express.  aza was asleep upstairs.  the movie was decent, a comedic noir.  in the middle of the movie we somehow got on the topic of my lil family’s impending trip to palestine.  and the fact that the border guards kinda dont trust me.  we ended up stopping the movie and i found myself drawing invisible maps of the middle east on my mother’s leather stool explaining the nakba, the 1967 war, the occupation.

it was post-midnight, we were a couple of drinks in, and his girlfriend keeps asking me questions.  so i keep tracing out a history of genocide and survival into the air.

when i would return from palestine on break, those of us in the organization with which i worked, were expected to to speak to groups of people, to share our experiences with folks in the states.  the organization encouraged us to speak infront of middle class liberal churches who saw us as a ‘voice for the voiceless’ and you know, we as americans have a ‘louder’ voice than the palestinians with whom we worked so we should use that voice to explain the situation in palestine.

i hated doing this.  resisted doing this.  the last thing i needed to do was use my privileged voice to be the palestine ‘expert’ simply because i had spent a smidgen of time in the region.

what i did was spent alot of time hanging out with my friends and my especially my brother’s friends who congregate at our house.  the boys and girls i had grown up with.  kids who had a high school education (if not the diploma), kids who worked shit jobs and hustled in rag tag cars.  i am like the big sister who made it out of our suburban neighborhood.

i really like talking to these kids.  they understand that the media doesnt tell the truth.  that you cant just stay neutral in a fight.  that the us government is shady.  i tell them: people think its muslims vs jews, but its not really, its just that palestinians have territory that israel wants.  so they are trying to get rid of the palestinian people.  and they nod their heads: yeah, thats real.

i tell them: its like living in the ghetto.  you hear someone got shot down the street.  you cant stay in your house all the time living in fear.  you got to get your kids ready for school.  you probably walk with them because you dont want them walking alone when the streets are hot.  so you keep living your life.  you got to go to work, buy groceries.  you probably dont have as much money as you need.  you probably have more family members living with you than you would like.  you dont think like, im living in the ghetto and its dangerous.  you think, what do i got to do today?  when the cops roll by you stay out of the way.  life is life is life.  thats what its like.

imagine me trying to explain this liberal church folks who think hip hop is too violent but really want to see peace in the middle east.

anyways, after his girlfriend exclaimed: hey i get why israel doesnt like you! and we all get another drink, we turn back on the movie and watch a couple of stoners kill a whole bunch of people.  we go to bed.  and i sleep better than i have in weeks.

daughter of a single mom: tough as shit

i have been following hermana, resist since i was preggers.  she has one of those blogs that i always want her to update more often.  like, every couple of weeks is just too long to wait. and i am not much of a commenter (i am getting better at it).

my younger brother and i were raised by a single working class/middle class mom.  she was and is amazing.  not only are we, her children, still alive, but she raised us to think for ourselves, to be politically conscious, to be artistic, creative and to speak up for ourselves.  the whole time we were growing up she always had her 40 plus hour a week job, plus the commute, plus a series of side projects/businesses.  my favorite was the afrocentric jewelry and accessories.  we spent our weekends looking at patterns, visiting african fabric shops, scouring magazines, sewing on a 1970-something blue singer machine, and learning about what it meant to be proud african-americans.

to this day my mom cheers for my creativity.   as long as i am writing, drawing, or creating something she is determined to support it.  she is the first one to remind me that i should be selling what i create.  that it is good.  hell, to quote jean grae, she is cataloguing my shit like she is afeni shakur.  she will read and edit anything i write.  and we still bond over walking through open-air markets, appraising the goods, and figuring out how *we* could do that.

and dont get me wrong, we bump heads often enough.  we are too much alike.  and i am the eldest daughter of a single mother, i grew up  a little too fast. know a little too much. i wont go into the details.  lets just say the details count.

single motherhood is tough as shit.  i am not a single mother.  i was just raised by one.  and if it wasnt for her i wouldnt have the visions that i have of what i want my daughter to learn from me.  what i admire most about my mother is that she insisted on putting energy behind that enormous amount of intelligence and creativity she has.  that she believed and still believes that her creativity is valuable and ought to be invested in.  but then she learned that from her mother, my grandmother, another incredibly intelligent and creative soul.

excitement

1. the house is a mess.  but it is the kind of mess that says that we are much closer to leaving.  the mess right before you look around and say, actually, we’ve done most of the hard work.

2. aza has been hanging out with her grandmother a couple of hours away this weekend.  i miss her alot.  it has been lovely to sleep in and hang out just el compa and i.  and be on no one’s schedule but our own.  i remember this feeling.  light and sweet.

3. about midwifery education.  and the path of self-study.  and what will the outlaw midwives project be…

4. to be traveling overseas again.  i couldnt get excited until we got our passports.  now my heart feels closer to my ribcage and my hair looks cooler.

5. started an art journal last night.  committed to working in it every day.  going to let it suck for a while.  interested in discovering authentic vision.  normally i start a journal, realize it sucks, get mad at it, decide to go back to doing ‘real art’ (whatever that is) and then feel jealous whenever i see someone else’s art journal, start a new art journal, let the cycle roll over and crush me once again.

6. to travel cross the country and see friends for the next couple of weeks.

7. had a dream about jealousy.  woke up realizing that of all the negative emotions that i believe are necessary to express (anger, grief, fear, etc.), jealousy is the difficult one for me.  i ignore others jealousy of me.  resent their jealousy of me.  and refuse to acknowledge when i am jealous.  so i dont know how to handle that emotion very well.  i am now opening my arms and allowing jealousy to pour into my life.  ok.  that is a little extreme.  how about i just meditate and reflect on jealousy first?

8.  to be a photojournalist.  to have a voice and vision to share with the world.  working hard to have a clear and soulful voice and vision.  i want to give the best of myself.

9. cyberquilting.  i am becoming a cyberquilter! wondering if i should get lil business cards that list my occupation as cyberquilter?  ways to confuse the fam even more…plus, how does one translate cyberquilter into arabic?

10.  and breakfast.  wonder what el compa will make for breakfast?

a dream of two births

this afternoon i took a nap.  and i dreamt of being in a multi-tiered tree house with dark wet steps, ramshackled wooden rooms like in a fixer-upper house that is always being fixed up.  i was downstairs in the living room with a woman about to give birth.  she had asked me to be there.  this was her second or third child.  she knelt  on the couch with her head against the wall behind the couch and moaned and squealed and her baby came slithering out.  i didnt do anything but be there.  she pushed when she wanted.  she moved as she wanted.  i remember her rolling on the floor.  i remember her on her back.  at one point she grabbed my hand and squeezed.

while she was nursing her baby, a woman upstairs sent a child to ask me to come to her birth.  we walked up the slippery stairs.  it was raining.  her room had two maybe three walls the rest of it was tree branches shielding her from the rain.  patches of green and blue sky peeked between the overhead branches.  her child too came out of her body in the midst of groans and shakes and shrieks.  we were all wet from the drizzle.

i woke up happy and warm thinking about outlaw midwives.  why did these two dream women request that i be at their births.  they caught their babies in their own hands.  i barely did anything but hum under my breath, hold a hand, and witness.  they did not need me there at all.  but they wanted me there.

when i work as a doula, i work hard to make sure that the mother knows that she didnt need me there.  that she did it all herself.  i liked it best when everyone in the room is just enamored of the mother and child and i could slip out of the room with a soft goodbye and with barely anyone noticing my departure.  i like it best when they wanted me to be at the birth, but they know and i know, they didnt need me to be there.

one doula said to me that the best thing that she could hear from a mother is: i couldnt have done it without you.  and i cant help but think: it could be an indication of the disempowerement of the primacy of the mother during birth when a mother says that to a birth worker.

10 reasons to fall in love

1. el compa and i have been arguing like crazy the past few months.  for a while it felt like when we werent arguing was more like a cease-fire, a temporary lull before it started again.  like we were just too exhausted to speak anymore and we might as well retreat in silence, lick our wounds, bury our dead, and prepare for the next battle.  i kept trying to figure out what we were arguing about.  on the surface it seemed so ridiculous.  the smallest things would just escalate into evil words being hurled at one another.  this isnt us, i kept thinking.  a few times i seriously thought this relationship is over.  how could we keep doing this to ourselves?

2. i finally realized that we had reached that age when a bunch of people around us expects us to settle down, get the striving for middle class respectability job, a house mortgage, a 9-5, a 401k, health benefits (and dental!), day care for aza, etc.  and instead we foolishly insisted upon living our lives.  in some people’s minds it is one thing for us to travel ‘to exotic places’ and have ‘adventures’ and co-create radical communities (uhhh…’whatever that means’) when we were childless and young, but now it was time for us to really give that up and focus on ‘raising a family’.  and we would have great stories to our child(ren) about our adventures when we were young…and so the emotional support that we had built around us was eroding because we werent following the plan.  and we still insisted on ‘going on vacation’.

a lil sisterist revelation

when i started reading midwife: sage femme, hebamme, comadrona, partera blog i thought she was of color.  thinking probably latina.  and then hours of reading later…6 or 7 pages into the blog, i found out that she was white.  i had to read the sentence 4 or 5 times to be sure…i am still in half-denial, like i really want to claim her as a radical woc.  but then i thought, no, it is awesome that she is white…frankly there arent that many white chicks that ‘get it’.  and when i meet (or read) one who does it gives me hope for sisterhood.  it reifies that ‘whiteness’ is not an adequate excuse to not struggle to be conscious in this world.  or for white folks to throw up their hands like: oh, there is no point in trying…

you know, sometimes life has a way of handing me some beauty.

and now…some articles/blog posts i am digging about birth.

after the birth what a family needs: this is for a friend who is looking at becoming a post-partum doula.  i think that she would be wonderful at it.

word magic: i have questions of anti-circumcision as a movement.  questions about respect for cultures and religions.  but i love this bit in this post:

She was shunned for many years for daring to speak up for the unassisted birth pioneers.  She loved being a midwife but didn’t do it with any compromise of her values.  She was fond of the idea that midwives should attend only one birth per month…She often said that “Every mother is a midwife” and then proceeded to further alienate herself from most other midwives by asking the rhetorical question “Why would I pay someone to be paranoid for me?”…Every profession needs someone to shoot straight from the hip and bring the profession back to a state of humility.

in my hometown

if you are wondering what kind of place i grew up in…welcome. what i love most about this video is 1. check out the diversity at a mc cain rally! that is woodbridge, va. 2. only 3-5,000 people came. 3. at the end of the video the tall guy says that no matter who gets in office they are going to have clean up bush’s mistakes. which is so sweet.

here

growing up there i took it for granted that america was a diverse country where every one mixed and mingled and everyone grew up with tough skin about their racial identity and fair play was fair and playful. when i was there last week my sister in law told me that when she drives to the richer neighborhoods all you see are mc cain posters. where we live it is obama all the way. i admire the courage of someone who put up a mc cain poster in our neighborhood.

thats what i like about this video. all of that pent up frustration has to go somewhere. they all look like they could live in my neighborhood. in the kind of house that would get pranked first.